Saturday, April 14, 2012

The American Nazi Party has registered its first lobbyist in Washington DC.

John Bowles, 55, told US media he wanted to address political
rights and ballot access and he expected congressmen would accept
meetings.
Lobbying was something the party would "try out for the first time and see if it flies," Mr Bowles told ABC News. He registered as a lobbyist this week.
Lobbying is a common practice in US politics and lobby groups are required to disclose their interests in detail.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Very little has been publicly known about the past of George
Zimmerman, the self-styled neighborhood watch captain responsible for
the shooting of Trayvon Martin over a month ago. In recent days,
information has been steadily released through various media outlets
referencing his family, history of violence, and hyper vigilance in
relation to upholding the law. While beginning to provide more clarity
in terms of his background, this information has also opened up the
doors to questions regarding whether the death of Trayvon Martin could
have been prevented.
Here is what is known: READ MORE

The video above, titled "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," was produced by a so-called "Super PAC" named "Winning Our Future."
While Winning Our Future states on its website: "Not authorized by any
candidate or candidate's committee," they also go on to say, "Winning
Our Future means nominating Former Speaker Newt Gingrich for President
in 2012. And advancing that goal is what Winning Our Future is all
about."

The backing for Winning Our Future appears to come in large part
from Gingrich's friend and longtime associate, billionaire gambling
mogul Sheldon Adelson. According to the New York Times, Adelson staked Winning Our Future with a $5 million war chest.

"When Mitt Romney Came to Town" appears to have been a component
of Mr. Gingrich's strategy for defeating Mr. Romney for the Republican
presidential nomination. However, Gingrich, under pressure from
Republican power brokers to tone down the criticism, has now backed away from the film
citing "inaccuracies" and saying, "I am calling on them to either edit
out every single mistake or pull the entire film." -- RSN StaffREAD MORE

Detainees at Guantanamo Bay are watched by military police. (photo: Reuters)

By Carol Rosenberg, The Miami Herald

16 January 12

The Obama administration may want to look
forward but but other countries are still interested in determining
whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.

Spanish judge on Friday re-launched an investigation into the alleged
torture of detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, one day after a British authorities launched a probe into CIA
renditions to Libya.

The twin developments demonstrated that while the
Obama administration has stuck to its promise not to investigate whether
Bush administration officials acted illegally by authorizing the use of
harsh interrogation techniques, other countries are still interested in
determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated
international law.

In Madrid, Judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez handed
down a 19-page decision Friday in which he said he would seek additional
information - medical data, a translation of a Human Rights Watch
report, elaboration on material made public by WikiLeaks, and testimony
from three senior U.S. military officers who served at Guantánamo - in
the case of four released Guantánamo captives who allege they were
humiliated and subjected to torture while in U.S. custody. READ MORE

By Jonathan Turley, Published: January 13

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights
in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and
regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for
denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been
taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been
condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree,
Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must
include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the
land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001,
this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of
an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act,
signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens.
At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country
change how we define ourselves?READ MORE

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - Boston-based Bain Capital LLC more than
doubled its money on GS Industries Inc. — the former parent company of
Georgetown Steel — under Mitt Romney's leadership in the 1990s, even as
the steel manufacturer went on to cut more than 1,750 jobs, shuttered a
division that had been around for 100 years and eventually sank into
bankruptcy.

Bain Capital spent $24.5 million to acquire GS Industries in 1993,
according to an investment prospectus for the company that was obtained
by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by McClatchy Newspapers. By the
end of that decade, Bain Capital estimated its partners had made $58.4
million off its investment in GS Industries, according to the
prospectus.

Bain Capital's partners also earned multimillion-dollar dividends from
GS Industries and annual management fees of about $900,000. But by the
time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, it owed
$553.9 million in debts against assets valued at $395.2 million.

Romney - who founded Bain Capital, one of the earliest leveraged-buyout
firms, in 1984 - was in charge of the firm for most of the time it
owned GS Industries. Romney left Bain Capital in 1999, two years before
the bankruptcy, to run the organizing committee for the Winter Olympics
in Salt Lake City, Utah.

"We were doing well and then Bain Capital bought us and they took
everything they could out of the company without making the investments
we needed to stay competitive," said James Sanderson, who has been with
the mill since 1974 and served as its union president since 1988. "They
ran the company into bankruptcy." READ MORE

Fox
is reinforcing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's attacks
on the Obama administration by parroting his misleading claim that since
President Obama took office, "92.3 percent of the job losses ... has
been women who've lost those jobs." In fact, this indicator is
meaningless in understanding how Obama's policies have impacted working
women as it ignores several important factors, including when the
recession began and the fact that more women are in the workforce today
than in January 2008.

Mitt Romney: "The Real War On Women Has Been Waged By The Obama Administration"

Both mainstream and conservative media outlets have responded to the
recent spike in gasoline prices by circulating talking points rooted in
politics rather than facts. As a whole, these claims reflect the
misconception, perpetuated by the news media, that changes in U.S.
energy policy are a major driver of oil and gasoline prices. READ MORE

Thursday, April 12, 2012

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida, is
charged with second-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon
Martin.

By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times

April 11, 2012, 5:25 p.m.

SANFORD, Fla. — For weeks, protesters around the nation have demanded the arrest of George Zimmerman.

A Florida special prosecutor made that happen Wednesday. She announced
that Zimmerman — the neighborhood watch volunteer who admitted to
fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager on a rainy night here in
February — had turned himself in and would be charged with second-degree
murder in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

"We did not come to this
decision lightly," said Florida State Atty. Angela Corey at a news
conference in Jacksonville.

Alluding to the intense publicity surrounding the case, she added, "Let
me emphasize that we do not prosecute by public pressure or by
petition."

Corey declined to discuss the details of the investigation that led her
office to charge Zimmerman, who had claimed self-defense — and who had
been free, though in hiding, for weeks. Nor would she say where he was
being held, "for his safety as well as for everyone else's safety." READ MORE

Residents wonder what's next after weeks of racial tension before
the arrest of a neighborhood watch volunteer who killed teen Trayvon
Martin.

By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times

April 12, 2012, 5:23 p.m.

SANFORD, Fla. — When the Rev. Al
Sharptonled a rally of thousands here last month, he told city leaders
that they "risked going down as the Selma or Birmingham of the 21st
century" unless George Zimmerman was arrested.

On Thursday, with Zimmerman behind bars, many here were wondering when they would get their reputation back.

"There's not all this racialism,
like everyone's saying," said Beth Rollf, who is white and owns
downtown's Taste of Thyme Cafe. "There are no riots. People need to know
Sanford for what it is: a quaint, artsy town with a lot to offer."

Whether Sanford will be scrubbed from the list of American cities with
an ignominious racial past was just one of the unresolved issues
reverberating the day after Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer,
turned himself in to authorities, charged with second-degree murder in
the slaying of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. READ MORE

LONDON -- The British phone hacking scandal
that resulted in scores of arrests and the July closing of the popular
tabloid News of the World could spread to the United States, a media
lawyer who represents several victims said Thursday.

Attorney Mark Lewis said inquiries by British police into illegal
phone interceptions by the tabloid were widening and he would be seeking
documentation in the U.S. on behalf of three of his clients, who he
said were victims of illegal phone interceptions.

The tabloid is owned by News International, the British branch of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
“The cases I am pursuing were by the News of the World against people
who were in the U.S. at the time they were hacked or were U.S.
citizens,” he said in a email to The Times sent while he was en route to
the airport.

“The scandal is not just confined to the United Kingdom or U.K.
companies,” he told the BBC, “but this goes to the heartland of News
Corp. and we will be looking at the involvement of the parent company
and in terms of claims there and that is something that I think will be
taken more seriously by investors and shareholders in News Corp.”

He also said that of his three clients, whom he declined to identify,
one had connections to Hollywood, another to the late Princess Diana
and the third to English national soccer. READ MORE

Republican Party Internet advertisement altered the audio of U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) oral arguments in an attack on President Barack Obama's health-care law.

In a web ad circulated this week, the Republican National Committee excerpts the opening seconds of the March 27 presentation by Obama's top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. In the ad, he is heard struggling for words and twice stopping to drink water.

"Obamacare," the ad concludes, in words shown against a photograph of the high court. "It's a tough sell."

A review of a transcript and recordings of those
moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a
much briefer period and completed his thought - rather than stuttering
and trailing off as heard in the edited version. READ MORE

How government investment created the technologies that have made us so rich

March 21, 2012

In the early days of the Solyndra debacle,
as the reality dawned on the White House that its half-billion-dollar
investment was about to go belly-up, former Obama economic adviser Larry
Summers famously observed that, "Government is a lousy venture
capitalist."

The quip,
discovered after House Republicans subpoenaed White House e-mails about
Solyndra, fairly well characterizes good Washington opinion these days
in the wake of the Solyndra bankruptcy. But before we conclude that
government ought to get out of the business of betting on new
technologies, we'd do well to try imagining our modern economy without
computers, the Internet and jet travel, all of which were heavily subsidized by the federal government.

It looks like the Koch Brothers’
efforts to take over the libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute and
oust long-time president Ed Crane has been thwarted. According to David Weigel,
who is close to these folks, Crane called a meeting of the Cato board
and used an obscure bylaw to expand it and then pack it with loyalists.

In a subsequent interview, Crane told Weigel this:

I
want to save Cato. I’ll step down if it ends this thing. It can’t be a
wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries. Who the hell is going to
take a think tank seriously that’s controlled by billionaire oil guys?
It’s just nuts! READ MORE

The idea's still in the lab -- and it won't solve everything
-- but theoretically, it should be possible to extract carbon straight
out of the air.

March 21, 2012

What
if, in addition to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, we could capture
them from the air? That’s the question that prompted Marc Gunther, an
author and contributing editor at Fortune magazine, to write the e-book Suck It Up,
a Kindle Single. Below is an excerpt from the book on the history of
the start-up Kilimanjaro Energy, a private company that is seeking to
solve the carbon extraction equation.

Working
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s, Klaus Lackner
had numerous interests: the behavior of high explosives, nuclear fusion,
and self-replicating machine systems. At some point, he turned his
attention to the technology used to capture CO2 from the smokestacks of
coal plants — technology in which the U.S. government has invested
billions of dollars, with little to show for it. He began to wonder
whether it might make more sense to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. So
when his daughter Claire asked for help with a science project, he asked
her: “Why don’t you pull CO2 out of the air?”

Chemical
engineers have known for decades that sodium hydroxide, a caustic base
also known as lye, will bind with CO2, an acid, to make carbonates.
That’s basically how CO2 is removed from the air so people can continue
to breathe on submarines or in spaceships. Claire accomplished the feat
by filling a test tube with a solution of sodium hydroxide, buying a
fish-tank pump from a pet store, and running air through the test tube
all night. By the next day, some of the sodium hydroxide had absorbed
CO2, creating a solution of sodium carbonate.

“I
was surprised that she pulled this off as well as she did,” Lackner
recalls, “which made me feel that it could be easier than I thought.” READ MORE

Ein Al Ariq spring near Nablus, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank. Following its takeover by Eli settlers, the spring was renamed Ein Hagvura. (Photo courtesy OCHA)

GENEVA, Switzerland,
March 21, 2012 (ENS) - Palestinians are losing access to water sources
in the West Bank as Israeli settlers take over springs. The settlers use
threats, intimidation and fences to ensure control of water sources
near the settlements, finds a new United Nations survey released today.

Thirty of the springs were found to be under full settler control, with
no Palestinian access to the area, according to the assessment carried
by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs over the
course of the past year.
The survey identified a total of 56 water springs close to the Israeli
settlements, the majority of which are located in Area C - which
represents over 60 percent of the West Bank where Israel retains control
over security, planning and building - and on land parcels recorded by
the Israeli Civil Administration as privately owned by Palestinians. READ MORE

Tennessee just became the fourth state in the nation to
include climate change denial in their science education curriculum.
Who's behind this crafty legislation? You guessed it.

March 22, 2012

The month of March has seen unprecedented heat and temperatures.
A rational thinking, scientifically-grounded individual could only
posit, "Well, hmm, I bet climate change has something to do with the
fact that in Madison, WI, it is 80 degrees in mid-March. Sometimes it's
60 or 70 degrees colder than this!"

While
that individual would be positing something that is the well-accepted
scientific consensus, in some states, under law, that is only a
"controversial theory among other theories."

Welcome
to Tennessee, which on March 19th became the fourth state with a legal
mandate to incorporate climate change denial as part of the science
education curriculum when discussing climate change. READ MORE

George Zimmerman is under arrest,
charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon
Martin, a Florida special prosecutor announced Wednesday.

Zimmerman, 28, who's been in
hiding since news of Martin's killing gained worldwide attention, turned
himself in on an arrest warrant, called a capias, Special Prosecutor Angela Corey said at a news conference.

"I
can tell you we did not come to this decision lightly," Corey said in
remarks broadcast live on TV and online. "We do not prosecute by public
pressure or by petition. We prosecute based on the facts in any given
case, as well as the laws of the state of Florida."

So what is second degree murder?

Florida's
jury instructions (which are based on the Florida statute) spell out
three elements that prosecutors must prove to establish second degree
murder beyond a reasonable doubt:

The victim is deceased,

The victim's death was caused by the defendant's criminal act, and

There was an unlawful killing of the victim "by an act imminently
dangerous to another and demonstrating a depraved mind without regard
for human life."

The last
element -- an "imminently dangerous" act that shows a "depraved mind" --
is further defined by Florida's jury instructions. Three elements must
be present: READ MORE

The so-called "JOBS Act," introduced by the far-right
Republicans and passed by members of both parties, opens the door to yet
more corporate abuse.

March 23, 2012

Here we go again. Once again the
'bipartisan' consensus in Washington, fueled by an intoxicating brew of
conventional wisdom laced with campaign cash, has repealed some of
those 'cumbersome regulations' that do nothing of value - nothing, that
is, except prevent catastrophes. There will be celebrating on both
sides of the aisle when the President signs this bill.

And when disaster strikes a few years from now, as it inevitably will, they'll all say "Nobody could have seen it coming." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même crap. Creationism can't disprove the theory of evolution - but a little time in Washington will make you think twice.

Here
we are, surrounded by still-smoldering financial wreckage, and almost
everyone in Washington is falling over themselves to repeat exactly the
same kinds of actions that got us into this mess. Last time around it
was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, introduced by Republican Sen. Phil
Gramm and enthusiastically signed by President Clinton in the presence
of Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

This
time it's the deceptively named "JOBS Act," introduced by the
far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members
of both parties. The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill
early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including
individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a
deregulating frenzy. READ MORE

And
yet, in this case, nothing. No impassioned appeals for loosening the
gun laws so that ordinary Americans could go to the store in the evening
to buy some candy and an iced tea without getting stalked and shot by
some unhinged vigilante. No solemn op-eds about the dangers for average
Americans when venturing unarmed into the streets of their own
neighborhoods. No fiery speeches from Wayne LaPierre insisting that if
only everyone in the neighborhood had been armed with submachine guns
they could have run outside and started firing immediately upon hearing
the screams for help. Nada. Why do you suppose that is?

If you need any further proof that
we are in the midst of a full-on patriarchal biblical-religious war on
women, a Wisconsin lawmaker is happy to provide it.

According to Yahoo News,
Wisconsin Rep. Don Pridemore helpfully suggests that, rather than
divorcing an abusive spouse, you should try to remember the things you
love about the guy while he is beating you up.

Instead
of leaving an abusive situation, women should try to remember the
things they love about their husbands, Representative Don Pridemore
said. "If they can re-find those reasons and get back to why they got
married in the first place it might help," he told a local news station. READ MORE

Here’s a rundown of the states with laws like the one in
Florida, where there’s no duty to retreat in public and where,
self-defense claims have some immunity in court.

March 25, 2012

“Stand Your Ground,” “Shoot First,”
“Make My Day” — state laws asserting an expansive right to self-defense
— have come into focus after last month’s killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

While local prosecutors have not arrested the shooter, George Zimmerman, the case is now being investigated by
the Department of Justice and a Florida state attorney. It’s not clear
whether Florida’s self-defense law will be applied in the case. (The police report on the shooting refers to it as an “unnecessary killing to prevent unlawful act.”)

Still,
in not arresting Zimmerman, local officials have pointed to Florida’s
wide definition of self-defense. In 2005, Florida became the first state
to explicitly expand a person’s right to use deadly force for
self-defense. Deadly force is justified if a person is gravely
threatened, in the home or “any other place where he or she has a right to be.”

While
millions of residents and visitors are working on their tans, shady
politics are prospering in the Sunshine State. What residents are now
learning is that the negative impact of the work of the
Republican-dominated legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott will
haunt them for years to come.

Most
of the new measures were approved over the past 12 months, but as we
are all learning, seven-year-old legislation is causing excessive pain,
heartbreak and anger in 2012.

Wisconsin's populist rebellion came after state GOP leaders attacked workers' rights and dignity.

March 23, 2012

“The
folks that were angry about this started a recall....Not hundreds, not
thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary
thing. They stood up and took their government back.” -- Gov. Scott Walker, discussing the 2002 recalls that led to his election as Milwaukee County Executive.

Those words, uttered by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Walker in an ad during his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, are strikingly relevant today.

In
a 60-day period during a cold Wisconsin winter, state residents
collected nearly one million signatures for Walker’s recall, with an
election date now scheduled for June 5. That election, which will likely
be very close and will almost certainly break new records for spending
in the state, will end this stage of a year-and-a-half-long battle over
Walker’s divisive reforms, including his controversial attack on public
employee unions. READ MORE

eterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan face unique hurdles in an already tough job market.

Many have suffered physical and mental injuries.
Others have a hard time getting employers to see the value of their
wartime experience.

"Being the best mortar man in the best battalion in
the world doesn't mean a whole lot when you come out," said Sean
Parnell, author of "Outlaw Platoon," a book about his experiences as an
Army platoon leader in Afghanistan in 2006. "Fifty percent of my men who
are now out of the military are living paycheck to paycheck - working
as a busboy, or at a bar, or maybe not working at all."

More than 2.2 million soldiers, Marines and sailors
have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Another 90,000 troops are slated to
return from Afghanistan by 2014.

For a long time, post 9/11 veterans have faced a much
higher jobless rate than the general population. Just a year ago, it
stood at 12.5%, well above the national average. A big push by employers
and government knocked the rate to 7.6% in February, even below the overall U.S. unemployment rate of 8.3%.

Still, many veterans struggle to find work.

"These guys have these bang-up resumes for the military and then they
get out and civilians don't know what to do with them," said Parnell.
"So they end up working at a Subway." READ MORE

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

What happens in a state controlled
and dominated by Republicans? In particular how do they deal with budget
deficits? Do they raise taxes? Of course not. What they do is literally
starve public schools of funding. This year the Texas Legislature cut $5.4 Billion dollars (via
the New York Times) from the state's budget previously dedicated to
public schools. Those budget cuts went into effect this year and will
continue next year.

Texas has
1,264 public school districts. Here are some of the consequences of
preserving tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich, and passing the
cost of balancing budgets onto the backs' of Texas' public school
children and their families according to the NY Times report:

Eliminating bus services: Many districts, to save money
have simply stopped providing bus services to children who live within a
two mile radius of their school. For many children this means that they
spend up to an hour or more walking to and from school each day. Other
school districts have started charging parents a fee (up to $355 per
year for one district) for children who are bused. Others now sell
advertising space on the side of school buses. READ MORE

Another victory in the progressive campaign against ALEC,
the right-wing corporate blueprint legislation source, which we've been
documenting here at AlterNet. This time, it's a major philanthropic
organization that has severed ties.

merican Crossroads, the biggest of the Republican "super PACs,"
is planning to begin its first major anti-Obama advertising blitz of
the year, a moment the Obama re-election campaign has been girding for
and another sign that the general election is starting in earnest.

With an anticipated bank account of more than $200
million, officials at American Crossroads said they would probably begin
their campaign this month. But they said they would focus the bulk of
the first phase from May through July, which they believe is a critical
period for making an impression on voters, before summer vacations and
the party conventions take place.

Steven J. Law, the group's leader, said the ads would
address the challenge of unseating a president who polls show is viewed
favorably even though many people disapprove of his handling of the
economy. Basically, Mr. Law said, "how to dislodge voters from him."

The ultimate goal of the Crossroads campaign, Mr. Law
said, would be to better connect Americans' disappointment with the
economy to their views of the president, especially among crucial swing
voters.

The Crossroads advertising push - the timing of which
has been the subject of avid speculation at the Obama campaign
headquarters in Chicago - would give the campaign of Mitt Romney,
the Republican front-runner, the time and cover to map out its national
organization, replenish its bank account and put the finishing touches
on its own long-discussed advertising plan, which is expected to
highlight the economic pain of ordinary Americans. READ MORE

Monday, April 9, 2012

What a crazy, delightful ever changing world! Who could have thoughtthat in 2012 young people in Moscow would put on a "flash mob" happening, dancing to an *83 year old* *American song* written by a Russian born American-Jew (Irving Berlin) whose last name is the capital of Germany...(Check out that red Chrysler 300 limo!!!)

To Water Down Curriculum On Evolution And Climate Science

On Monday, the Tennessee state legislature passed legislation that requires public schools to teach the “controversy” over evolution, global warming, and human cloning:

The
Senate voted 24-8 for HB368, which sponsor Sen. Bo Watson, R-Hixson,
says will provide guidelines for teachers answering students’ questions
about evolution, global warming and other scientific subjects. Critics call it a “monkey bill” that promotes creationism in classrooms.

In 1925, Tennessee was the home of the Scopes monkey trial,
where local jurors upheld the conviction of a biology teacher for
teaching evolution in his classroom, tarring the reputation of the
state. Climate denial legislation has
become widespread across the United States, in part due to the efforts
of the corporate-funded right-wing American Legislative Exchange
Council. READ MORE

CNN HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich
might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him
with moderate voters in the general election.

ERIC
FEHRNSTROM (ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SPOKESMAN): Well, I think you hit a reset
button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an
Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

The
only thing surprising about this is that Mitt Romney's campaign is
admitting ahead of time what we already knew: that Romney doesn't have
any real core principles and will say whatever he thinks it will take to
win the election. Read more

The claims made in a book from the biotechnology industry
are laughable. But these blatant lies are passed off as 'science' for
schoolchildren.

March 20, 2012

It's not enough that the biotech
industry -- led by multinational corporations such as Monsanto, Dow,
Syngenta, BAS, and Dupont -- is poisoning our food and our planet. It's
also poisoning young minds.

In a blatant attempt at brainwashing, the Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has widely circulated what it calls a Biotechnology Basics Activity Book for kids, to be used by "Agriculture and Science Teachers." The book -- called Look Closer at Biotechnology
-- looks like a science workbook, but reads more like a fairy tale.
Available on the council's Web site, its colorful pages are full of
friendly cartoon faces, puzzles, helpful hints for teachers -- and a
heavy dose of outright lies about the likely effects of genetic
engineering on health, the environment, world hunger and the future of
farming.

CBI's lies are designed specifically for children, and intended for use in classrooms.

Complaining about having to do their own dishes, or bragging
about $800,000 car garages, the 1 percenters are all but screaming “let
them eat cake” from the ramparts.

March 21, 2012

As the unemployment rate still sits above 8 percent, and one in three Americans struggles to afford medical bills, even the filthiest of filthy rich presidential candidates is at least pretending to empathize with the average American. Granted, they sometimes slip up and expose just how wealthy they are — but at least they are trying.

The
same cannot be said of some of these candidates’ cronies in the 1
percent. Whether complaining about having to do their own dishes, or
bragging about their car garages costing more than the average American
makes in a lifetime, the 1 percenters are all but screaming “let them
eat cake” from the ramparts. Here are 10 particularly egregious examples
from the last few months.

Need something to kickstart your American Spring protest?
Consider that big corporations are happy to take our tax dollars --
while finding new ways to skip out on Uncle Sam.

March 22, 2012

Like me, you’re probably knee-deep
in receipts and forms right now, getting ready to pay your share in
taxes so that our country can function. Meanwhile, many giant
corporations are getting a free ride. Fairness is one of our most
treasured American values, but “scam and dodge” has become the mantra of
our corporations and the pols who protect them.

Big
business apologists like to tell us that the U.S. corporate tax rate of
35 percent is too high, and makes companies less “competitive” with
foreign firms. Yet we all know that corporations hire legions of wily
accountants to find loopholes that often bring their tax rate down to
next to nothing.

In 2008,
Goldman Sachs paid a laughable 1.1 percent of its income in taxes. That
same year, it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an $800
billion bailout, courtesy of you and me.READ MORE

nline
activists who helped sink the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) earlier
this year have now turned their sights to a House cybersecurity bill,
the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

In recent days, posts comparing CISPA to SOPA have received thousands of "up votes" on Web forum Reddit and have reached the front page of the popular link and discussion site.

Reddit helped rally opposition to SOPA
and was one of the first major websites to declare that it would black
out in protest of the anti-piracy bill. The massive Web protest, which
was joined by Google and Wikipedia, caused a public outcry and forced
Congress to scrap the anti-piracy bill.

Recent posts on Reddit have called CISPA the "return
of SOPA," "the latest attempt by Congress to try to regulate and control
the Internet" and a "draconian privacy invasion bill."

A Google search for "CISPA" now returns numerous blogs
that decry the legislation as an attempt to censor the Internet. One
online petition opposing the bill has already gathered more than 300,000
signatures.

But a House aide who supports CISPA said the measure has nothing to do with anti-piracy enforcement or censorship.

"There's no authority to censor or block sites in the
bill," he said. "The only authority is to share information with the
private sector and for them to voluntarily share it with the government.
There's nothing in here that would allow you to block or shutdown a
website."

CISPA, which is authored by Reps. Mike Rogers
(R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and has more than 100
co-sponsors, is expected to come to the House floor for a vote during
the week of April 23.

An apartment building being razed in Cleveland. (photo: Michael Williamson/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

By Shaila Dewanand, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, The New York Times

08 April 12

n
February, JPMorgan Chase donated a home to an Iraq war veteran in
Bucoda, Wash., and Bank of America waived the $140,000 debt that a
Florida man still owed after the sale of his foreclosed home. Over the
last year, Wells Fargo has demolished about a dozen houses in Cleveland.

Banks do things like this - real estate transactions that do nothing to prevent foreclosure
- all the time. But beginning this month, they can count such
activities as part of their new commitment to help people stay in their
homes.

That commitment comes under the landmark $25 billion
foreclosure abuse settlement between the government and five major banks
announced last month. The settlement promises that of the $25 billion,
the banks will give $17 billion "in assistance to borrowers who have the
intent and ability to stay in their homes," according to a summary of
the settlement. But more than half of that money can be used in ways
that will not stop foreclosures, including some activities that are
already standard bank practices.

For example, the banks can wipe out more than $2
billion of their obligation by donating or demolishing abandoned houses.
Almost $1 billion can be used to help families that have already
defaulted move out.